3

On my old server, and most other devices I have run, there is a provided mail program.

On my new CentOS 6 server, running postfix as the MTA, I cannot send command-line email via mail - the tool is not there.

When running a yum whatprovides mail call, I get nothing helpful back:

$ yum whatprovides mail
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Determining fastest mirrors
 * base: centos.kiewel-online.ch
 * extras: centos.kiewel-online.ch
 * updates: centos.kiewel-online.ch
base                                                     | 3.7 kB     00:00
base/primary_db                                          | 4.2 MB     00:00
cr                                                       | 3.5 kB     00:00
cr/primary_db                                            | 3.9 MB     00:00
extras                                                   | 3.0 kB     00:00
extras/primary_db                                        | 1.9 kB     00:00
updates                                                  | 3.5 kB     00:00
updates/primary_db                                       | 3.3 MB     00:00
Warning: 3.0.x versions of yum would erroneously match against filenames.
 You can use "*/mail" and/or "*bin/mail" to get that behaviour
No Matches found

How is user-to-user mail supposed to be sent on CentOS 6?

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9

In CentOS, this binary is provided by the mailx package:

yum install mailx

FYI, as the message at the bottom of your post indicates, you are using whatprovides incorrectly. Proper usage searching mirrors for a file called 'mail' would have been:

yum whatprovides */mail
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  • I didn't realize I'd been running the whatprovides wrong - it's how you did it on older editions of yum :)
    – warren
    Nov 7, 2011 at 19:29
  • yum whatprovides */mail or yum whatprovides *bin/mail?
    – user67218
    Oct 27, 2012 at 14:19

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